Holy Saturday
The best Saturdays are when old girls return with their babies. Time was, a girl would leave school and return four or five years later with her first, for congratulations, tea, and Celestine’s special ginger biscuits. Fewer babies now, and later. Same with vocations.
Old girls come to the convent, not the boarding school. It wouldn’t do to give young pupils ideas. That’s what Anne tells herself, but it’s also true that up here in the convent they can hold the little ones and softly stroke their cheeks, and tease each other girlishly for keeping them too long and not giving each sister her turn. Outside they’ve to be careful. Congratulate, admire, move on. People are watching now, and anyway it’s never looked quite right, a nun with a baby, even before all the nastiness. Though their order never went in for any of that. But people judge you, a woman who won’t have a child. You’re literally wearing a hat that declares it. Stop at a pram in the street and you’re either too indifferent or too needy, you just can’t get it right.
The knock on the parlour door is the two raps the girls were taught, but timid. Yet instead of staying put and summoning her in with a word, Anne crosses the room in two steps and has the door all but wrenched off its hinges before she can consider why. Carmel Cassidy, née Murphy of Murphy’s Fine Butchers and Victuallers, now married to a Guard no less, steps back surprised and clutches her baby.
- Come in come in, there’ll be tea in a minute. Celestine’s getting slow but she can’t wait to see you. Don’t let her give the baby sweets, will you, she hasn’t an ounce of sense. Will you sit down?
It’s more words than Anne’s ever said to the girl in one go. They stare at each other, frozen. Embarrassed, though she surely has no reason to be, Anne retreats to the high-backed armchair.
Carmel advances cautiously and stands by the visitor’s chair. Long ago, she’d stood by that chair as her father told Anne what she already knew: the mother dead, the house emptying of older brothers, Carmel the after-thought still a year too young to board, and the plainly spoken worry she’d grow up coarse, or wild, or worse. Carmel’s expression was surprisingly blank as her father voiced his wife’s dying fear. He was right, of course, but there was the matter of fees. They’d sent the child out and came to an agreement just as the tea went cold, and each year until her predictably mediocre Leaving Cert, a fifth of Carmel’s board was paid in stewing lamb and round-steak mince. Hard not to think of that with the child’s beret so often lost or askew, her mouth never quite shut so you imagined a dribble forming at the corner, and the meat never delivered more than a day or two from being off. Discipline is an act of love. They’d barely raised a hand to the girls, kept the best kitchen of any school in the county, but order, if it doesn’t spring naturally from within, must be built like a house to live in, a house you carry on your back.
- Would you like to see him, Sister?
Carmel tilts the baby, still swaddled in a blanket with a print of tumbling, laughing elephants and beachballs, and pulls his crocheted hat back to show a dark head already as thick as her own fine, mousy hair.
- He’s lovely, Carmel. Is that your father’s nose?
- He takes after Gerry’s side.
A note of defiance? Surely not. Such a quiet, implacable girl, one foot in front of the other no matter what you said or did. Not that she’d done anything out of the ordinary. Anne’s conscience was clear. But always that sense of being watched and found wanting. It had grated. She needed to be honest with herself about that. Always that faint top note of need that set your teeth on edge. But what could Carmel have expected? The child knew favourites weren’t permitted, and anyway must have guessed she’d never have been one.
Carmel pulls the little hat back down to the baby’s eyebrows, though the parlour’s fire has been specially lit.
- Won’t you sit down, Carmel?
The girl looks hard at the chair her father had sat in and seems to talk herself into it. She sits, flinching a little.
- Are you alright?
- Still a bit sore.
Anne makes an automatically sympathetic face, then they both shake their heads in disbelief that this could be mentioned between them. Anne smiles first, then Carmel. They could nearly laugh.
- Are you alright? Was it alright?
Carmel looks away almost haughtily. She’s been somewhere Anne can never go and she lets that hang between them for a moment, then softens and unwraps the baby from his blanket. With his hat fully off his head is still a bit pointy. Anne can just make out the faded yellow on his cheek from when he was pulled out.
- Oh you both suffered, oh Carmel.
Anne leans forward and raises her hand to touch the baby’s cheek. Her wrist rotates a little and her palm cups softly to cover his bruise. It is nothing at all like a hand raised and stiffened and hungry for a slap.
- No!
Carmel pushes back violently into her chair, startling the baby. His blue-grey eyes flutter open and he takes in a great breath.
- It was just to touch him. I wouldn’t ever.
Carmel puts him on her shoulder, faced away from them both. She pats his back and says it’s alright, it’s just wind.
- And Carmel, I never.
- Don’t say that, Sister. You did.
The baby briefly lifts his head but can’t hold it up. His face pitches onto Carmel’s collar bone and he lets out a series of hacking little sobs in advance of a roar.
- I’ll feed him now.
She says it so flatly. Doesn’t even ask.
Anne stands up and puts a briquette on the fire, nudges it with the poker so she’ll have something to do, but still can’t help seeing the mouth, tiny, like the baby himself, but also impossibly big, gaping and open, grizzling its way onto an inflamed nipple.
- Pffffth.
Carmel squeezes her eyes shut as she puts more of it into his mouth than seems possible. The baby latches, and she holds herself perfectly still. That same blank look Anne remembers.
- Is it very bad?
- Mastitis. It’s getting better.
- But still hard?
Carmel nods.
- It is. Hard. But Gerry’s family are great.
- You’ve done so well, Carmel.
Carmel’s chin juts out in an attitude. If she were still a child they’d call it insolence.
- You mean I have money now?
- I mean you’re a good mother.
- And how would you know?
Carmel spits it right out like a hairball and leaves it there, no apology, no relenting. The baby slurps greedily and some milk runs out the side of his mouth. She dabs his neck with a white muslin bib, digging into the crease under his chin to get it all out.
- I did what I could for you, Carmel. I’ve a lot on my shoulders.
- You didn’t.
- Is this what you came back for, to have a go at me?
- I just wanted you to see him. I thought it would… I don’t know.
She takes the baby off her breast and sits him on one leg, his tummy against the other, and rubs his back. His hands break free of the mittens of his pale green Babygro to bat uselessly on her thigh. He burps up a trickle of milk. Carmel catches it and puts him back on her breast. This time her face crumples in pain she doesn’t hide.
- It’s meant to get easier, Sister. He’s nearly five weeks old.
She whispers it hopelessly and tears roll down her face.
Anne thinks of the pietà and its contrast to the ungraciousness of this child’s ordinary, exhausted grief. How her soft, leaky body and lumpen posture meet nobody’s ideal, how they curve around the infant just as it needs.
She crouches by the arm rest and puts one hand on Carmel’s wrist, another on her shoulder.
- You’re doing so well, Carmel. He’s thriving. You’re a beautiful little mother. Think of the Virgin, how she suffered and how much God loved her for it.
There must be other ways to put it, but Anne can’t find any. Carmel shakes her head and cries harder in angry, raw despair. There’s nothing to be done for her, nothing at all. Yet Anne’s hand reaches up of its own accord and her thumb runs along Carmel’s jaw to catch a tear. She rubs the tiny jewel into the back of Carmel’s hand, then before the words for what she’s about to do take form in her mind, and the admonishment that would surely go with them, she takes the tear-wet hand and kisses it meekly like it’s an ecclesiastical ring. Her head still bowed, she mashes her lips inward and tips them with her tongue. The exact same saltiness as her own. The body knows.
The young woman’s eyes go wide and she briefly stops crying, seems to loosen somehow, then starts again. Something’s gone out of her and it’s now just simple sorrow. Anne grips the child tight and holds her until she’s done and for some time after that.
The mantelpiece clock ticks into their noticing and they awake as if from an enchantment. Carmel blows her nose on the baby’s bib. He’s nodded off on the breast and has to be burped sitting up, his head dipped drunkenly onto his chest. Anne smooths her skirt and sits back down in her high-backed chair. She reaches for the little bell she used to ring to summon a lay-nun from the kitchen, though they did away with all that years ago.
- You must be thirsty, Carmel. Where’s Celestine gone to with the tea?
- I suppose they want to give you the time with the baby.
- And with you. Do you need to do the other side?
- I will in a bit when it’s too sore not to. Do you want to hold him?
- I couldn’t.
Carmel gets up slowly and lays the bib on Anne’s shoulder. Anne stays still as he’s settled on her chest with his face turned in against her neck. She cups her hand under his padded little bottom. His knees are drawn up and two small heels push down on her palm.
- Are you alright, Sister?
- Oh Carmel he’s lovely, just lovely.
- He is.
- Can I stroke his head?
- Of course.
Carmel drapes the blanket around the baby, pushing it into the chair to hold it snug. She stands up straight and looks down on them both.
- You’re well tucked in now, Sister.
- A long time since anyone did that for me, Carmel.
The girl smiles a little sadly.
- I suppose we never grow out of wanting it.
The baby groans, then sighs. He breathes faster than Anne would have imagined, but surprisingly calmly. Such soft, animal warmth. She feels like she might cry, too, but also fight to the death for him. Decades of girls passed through this parlour, her always in this same chair. She’d thought nothing would ever satisfy for them. Now she knew. They’d wanted so little it couldn’t even be measured.
- Are you alright, Sister?
- I am. Carmel, listen to me, I’m …
She stops. Clears her throat, starts again. Even now, she just cannot get that word out.
Carmel waits. Nothing. Then with a slow nod she sets the moment aside like something she’s made but cannot use.
- I’ll leave you with him, Sister, and see the sisters waiting in the kitchen.
- Are you sure?
- I am.
She goes out and gently closes the door.
Anne hears exclamations and laughter, the creak of that loose board in the corridor, the distant jangle of teaspoons. She dips her head softly to touch her lips on the baby’s dark, silky hair, her nose to the milk-tinged sweat of his balled little fist.
Maria Farrell is an independent writer and speaker, and Senior Fellow at Large for the University of Western Australia’s Tech & Policy Lab. Based in London, she has worked in technology policy for twenty years, including at The World Bank, ICANN, the International Chamber of Commerce, Paris, the Confederation of British Industry, and The Law Society of England and Wales.
She has written for The Guardian, Conversationalist, New European, Slate, Medium, the Irish Times and Irish Independent, and appeared as a tech expert on BBC, Sky News, NBC and TRT. She is a graduate of University College Dublin, the Dublin Institute of Technology, and the London School of Economics, and has just this minute finished a PhD at Goldsmiths College, London!!! Her short stories have appeared in Westerly and Lunate.